WIRED Awake: 10 must-read articles for 14 January

Your WIRED.co.uk daily briefing. Today, the HFEA will rule on whether CRISPR gene editing can be used in human embryo research, Google has introduced spatial audio capabilities to its Cardboard virtual reality SDK, humanity's carbon emissions may be delaying an ice age and more.

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Sinking like a Pebble: is the Fitbit buyout a sign the wearables market is doomed?

ByAmelia Heathman

Today, the UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) will evaluate researcher Kathy Niakan's request to use the CRISPR gene editing technique to knock out development genes in day-old embryos (Science). Niakan, of the Francis Crick Institute in London, hopes to make findings that could improve future treatments for infertility. Her research focusses on the exact process of how a fertilised egg cell becomes a blastocyst -- a cell cluster that implants into the uterus -- and the embryos she uses, donated by IVF clinics, are destroyed when they are seven days old. Niakan applied to extend her work to include CRISPR gene editing in September.

Google's Cardboard VR system is being upgraded to support spatial audio, with an SDK update that will allow apps to "produce sound the same way humans actually hear it". All users will need is a normal pair of headphones, a Cardboard viewer and a smartphone to power it all. According to the release announcement, the SDK "lets you specify the size and material of your virtual environment, both of which contribute to the quality of a given sound" and "combines the physiology of a listener’s head with the positions of virtual sound sources to determine what users hear."

Samsung doesn't have to pay Apple $399 million, Supreme Court rules

Humanity's carbon emissions could have delayed the next ice age by over 50,000 years, according to a team of German scientists (BBC). In a letter to the journal Nature, the researchers report that current shape of the Earth's orbit around the Sun would normally have prompted the end of an interglacial period and the start of a new ice age a few hundred years ago, at the beginning of the industrial revolution. However, Andrey Ganopolski from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research told the BBC: "If we had a CO2 concentration of 240 parts per million (200 years ago) then an ice age could start, but luckily we had a concentration that was higher, 280ppm." The current concentration of CO2 is about 400ppm.

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Apple letter is clearest hint yet it's working on a self-driving car

ByVictoria Woollaston

The mysterious piece of space junk, dubbed WT1190F, that plunged into the Indian Ocean on 13 November 2015 was most probably the translunar injection module of Lunar Prospector, according to Nasa's Paul Chodas (Nature). After pushing the Lunar Prospector probe out of Earth's orbit in July 1999, the module detached, while the probe itself orbited the moon for 19 months before being deliberately crashed into its south pole. While the identity of WT1190F, the only artificial object to ever make an uncontrolled reentry at a precisely predicted time and place, can't be completely confirmed unless debris is found, the injection module is by far the most likely candidate based on position and trajectory.

As promised in December, Microsoft's ChakraCore JavaScript engine, used in the Edge browser, is now open source (ZDnet). The company even plans on porting it to Linux, with a development roadmap stating that the team plans "an implementation of ChakraCore interpreter and runtime, no JIT, on x64 Ubuntu Linux 15.10" for June 2016. The sources are on GitHub now and use the MIT License, which only requires that you include a copyright notice in derivative code.

Action video camera maker GoPro has laid off 7 percent of its staff and issued a profit warning, shifting its projected fourth quarter earnings from 2015 from $500-$550 million in revenue to $435 million, compared to $633.9 million in 2014 (The Verge). The company blames "lower than anticipated sales of its capture devices", largely blamed on the high launch price of the Hero 4 Session mini camera. GoPro says that it will be focussing on new products in the coming year, including its first drone and 360-degree camera.

Ross Ulbricht, the convicted founder of the Silk Road darknet marketplace, has filed a 170-page appeal that in part hinges on corruption on the part of investigating agents (Ars Technica). Critical new information in the appeal is that Ulbrich's attorney, Joshua Dratel, was not allowed to mention corruption allegations against investigating Baltimore DEA agents Carl Force and Sean Bridges, who have since been convicted. Ulbricht also continues to maintain that he was not "Dread Pirate Roberts", that the handle passed between multiple people, and that "much of the evidence against Ulbricht inauthentic, unattributable to him, and/or... unreliable".

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Pebble shuts down as it confirms it's being bought by Fitbit

ByVictoria Woollaston

Microsoft has announced that, starting later this month, users running Windows 7 or 8.1 Pro, even those joined to a domain, will begin to see the Windows 10 upgrade app in their taskbar (TheNextWeb). This particularly targets small business users, and the move will importantly come with a number of measures to allow domain administrators to block the upgrade roll-out using Group Policy rules. Microsoft says that Windows 10 is now running on 200 million devices.

Dungeons & Dragons owner Wizards of the Coast has launched the Dungeon Masters Guild, an online publishing venture that allows tabletop RPG enthusiasts to self-publish their own modules for D&D fifth edition's standard Forgotten Realms setting (Ars Technica). Authors will receive half the money from any sales of approved content. WoC has also published a version of the 5e rules under the Open Game Licence, allowing designers to create -- but not profit from -- entire new RPGs based on the system.

In a demonstration of what's been dubbed 'robotic falconry', a team of engineers from Michigan Technological University have developed a drone that can capture and disable other drones in its airspace (Motherboard) The drone-catcher, which can act under remote control or autonomously, shoots a large net over its target from about 12 metres away, and then either releases it some distance away or brings it back to its controller for inspection.

In possibly the biggest boost to the robotics industry since the re-invention of the robot kitten, the BBC has ordered a full reboot of Robot Wars. The classic automaton gladiatorial deathmatch showcase will be shot inside a custom-built "bullet proof" arena by Mentorn Scotland.

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